Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

A young telephone operator in the Asai
Pharmaceutical Company, Ayako Murai (Isuzu Yamada) is in love with a fellow
colleague, Nishimura (Kensaku Hara), a love which he returns with several
excuses and lies. At nights Mr. Nisimura has been accompanying the company
director’s wife, Sonosuke (Benkei Shiganoya), to the theater. Ayako notices him
being paid for his services, but the young man denies everything, not
recognizing his own behavior as a kind of prostitution. Unhappy at home, the
company head, Sumiko (Yoko Umemura)—presented from the beginning of the film as
a petulant, selfish, and abusive man—attempts to involve the young Ayako in an
affair, which she rejects.

When it becomes apparent that her father, who has embezzled 300 Yen from
the company for which worked, will soon be imprisoned if we cannot come up with
the money, Ayako attempts to borrow the money from Nisimura, but he refuses.
Although Ayako is a spirited young woman, arguing against her father for his
transgressions, she finally agrees to become Asai’s mistress so that she might
raise the money to save her father. Leaving home, Ayako enters a new nightmare
world that might be described as the inverse of Dorothy’s Oz (The Wizard of Oz was shot in the US
three years later). The old Asai, setting her up in an apartment, forces her to
redo her hair in the manner of married woman so that he might appear with her
in public. And much of the day she is forced to sit alone awaiting the return
of her unfeeling lover.

When Asai’s wife encounters the two of them at a puppet play, he forces
another of his employees to insist that it was him who is seeing Ayako, not Asai, deceiving the incensed wife. But
soon after, she perceives the real truth when Asai’s doctor mistakenly shows up
at their house to care for Asai, when, in fact, he has fallen ill in Ayako’s
apartment. The affair ends, abruptly, disgracing Ayako.

Running into Nisimura in the street, the two come together again, he
asking Ayako to marry him, but embarrassed by her situation, she rushes off. Later,
however, she becomes determined to seek out Nisimura, accepting his offer and
admitting her past. If his love is strong enough, she will marry him, freeing
herself from her disagreeable life.

Meanwhile, Ayako discovers from her sister that her college brother has
run out of tuition, and she agrees to take up with another unpleasant
businessman, Fujino (Eitarō Shindō) to secretly raise money for her brother’s
education. She raises the money, and attempts to fool Fujino into giving extra
money so that she can marry Nisimura. But when she walks out on him, Fujino
calls the police, accusing her of soliciting from him. Ayako, meanwhile,
attempts to explain her past to a horrified Nisimura, but is interrupted by the
police who arrest her. At police headquarters Nisimura denies any involvement
with Ayako, denying any desire to marry her, and the young girl is forced to
admit to a crime she had committed only in search a way to further help her
family and give herself a better life.

Released by the police, she returns home, hoping for at least some
appreciation for her acts, like Dorothy, speaking the cliché “There’s no place
like home”; Mizoguchi’s irony in that statement almost breaks our hearts, as reality
in Osaka is shown to be the reverse of Dorothy’s Kansas homestead. Over a
family meal, of which she never offered a bite, Ayako is shunned by her
brother, berated by her father, and even derided by her younger sister, cast
out from her home.

The film’s last scene shows her walking along the side of the railroad
tracks, pondering what might be the “disease of delinquency” for which her
family and society have condemned her. Clearly, in answer to that, she must
attempt a voyage into a strange new world once more. As in so many Mizoguchu
works, women—particularly strong and nonsubservient women—are abused by
Japanese society, ultimately having little choice but use their bodies in order
to survive. The delinquency of which Ayako, in the end, is accused, is actually
a product of the delinquency of nearly all the film’s male figures, who
together scheme, lie, cheat, and abuse the young girls they encounter. And,
accordingly, the independent women end up as mere figures of service as if they
had never left home in the first place. The only successful woman in this world
(head of the Woman’s Association) is the unloving and tart tongued Mrs. Asai,
and it is she, as we observe in an early scene, who sleeps with a version of
Dorothy’s beloved dog; without a scarecrow, woodsman, or lion to accompany her,
Ayako is completely on her own, with only her own brain, heart, and courage to
help her move forward.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Josef von Sternberg (writer and
director) The Salvation Hunters /
1925 / the showing I saw was part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s
“Los Angeles Past, Present, Future” series, presented on July 19, 2013 in
conjunction with The Presence of the
Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA /organ music was performed live by Robert Israel.

Filmmaker Josef von Sternberg’s first
film, The Salvation Hunters we were
told last night by his son Nicky von Sternberg, was paid for entirely by the
director, clearly a leap faith into the medium by the young cinematographer.
Like many of von Sternberg’s later films, in this one we recognize from the
very beginning that the director is less interested in a psychologically
realist presentation than he is in his Zola-like thematic. Just as I have
argued previously for fiction, the early twentieth-century filmmakers had
seemingly not yet determined to choose the psychological approach over the theatricality
of a picture of ideas. Although von Sternberg’s world presents strong images,
they are for the most part, framed and statically portrayed in order to
reiterate the issues of his film. Unlike some silent filmmakers, who attempted
to keep their storyboards to a minimum, von Sternberg uses the story board
continuously, at times cutting to his characters and their environment only for
a few seconds before returning his statements to declare, that these figures—a
suffering girl (Georgia Hale), an out-of-work boy (George K. Arthur) and a
homeless urchin (Bruce Guerin) who, quite accidently, come together as a kind
potential family unit when a brute (Olaf Hytten) attempts to engage the girl in
sex.

So von Sternberg tells us, these three victims are creatures of the mud,
“crawling close to the earth,” but seeking some way out of their situation. Von
Sternberg does not at all attempt to give us their back-stories or an
explanation of how that have come to this harbor, but rather defines them
according the nets and ropes of the sea-going village, continually cutting
across their space with the perpetual motions of the dredge, relentlessly
digging up mud from the bottom of the harbor to pour it into a long boat which
appears unable to hold it contents, as the mud pours back into the waters only
to be dredged up once again.

Threatened by the brute, the three flee the muddy harbor, traveling to
the nearby city (presumably Los Angeles) where they appear equally out of
place, with no food or money. Spotting the newcomers a man (Otto Matiesen) and
gentleman (Stuart Holmes), offer the “family” temporary quarters, but it is
clear that both are doing it only so that they can keep the girl nearby, using her
for sex. To break down her defenses, the captors refuse to buy the family any
food and they are forced, that first night, to go hungry. On the following day,
the boy goes in seek of a job, but comes back to the flat empty-handed.
Although the man already has a woman, who appears to be his tortured wife, he
again attempts to take advantage of the girl. She seems to consider going along
with his offer, particularly when he hands her some money for her services, but
the child grabs up the bill and runs, bringing home provisions and temporary
protecting the girl from the sex-starved stranger.

Similarly, the man attempts to pimp the girl’s services to the
gentleman, but when that too fails, he determines to attempt to romance her in
the out-of-doors. They drive to what looks like a patch of weeds instead of a
comfortable pastoral spot; at the entry to this world stands a real estate
sign, reading: “Here Your Dreams Come True.” It is ironic commentary on the
evil man’s plot, and when she fails to respond to his romancing, the child
rushes to the girl’s side, attempting to protect her, the man, just as the
brute before him, kicking away the child. Once more, despite his apparent lack
of athletic prowess, the rushes to protect the child and girl, this time, for a
change, besting the man and continuing to beat him until he falls from the real
estate sign into his waiting automobile below. Together, the three, children of
the sun, walk off thesunset. We have no
idea where they may be going, but they have succeeded, we are assured in altering
their previous lives.

Although this film, in hindsight, has a great many interesting
qualities, it was a complete failure at its premiere. As von Sternberg has
written: “The members of the cast were in the audience, which greeted my work
with laughter and jeers and finally rioted. Many walked out, and so did I.”
Soon after, George Arthur, arranged for Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks
to see the film, and reportedly, both reacted with enthusiasm. Chaplin later
declares he praised it only a joke. But, in fact, the film’s subject and
ending, is not so very dissimilar to Chaplin’s own films—albeit that von
Sternberg’s dour film has none of the little tramp’s comic adventures
beforehand. And what now seems impossibly dated, represented at the time
another possible direction Hollywood films might have taken—and which it did,
in fact, experiment with in the later and greater films of the imperious
director.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, which he,
himself, describes as “a light, very light comedy,” is not one of his major
pieces of cinema, and, at times is almost as light as a piece of peanut
brittle, seemingly ready, like the plane in which his characters are trapped,
to snap in half. A slight riff on everything from Hitchcock’s Vertigo and, perhaps, even Mel Brooks’
satire of the same, High Anxiety,
Almodóvar’s work also calls up, at moments, the Zucker brothers’ Airplane! even referencing, so it seems,
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Almodóvar’s tale has absolutely no plot,
but consists of conversations among a group of obsessed passengers (the original
title can be understood as either “the fleeting lovers” or “the passenger
lovers,” although I’d like to translate it is as “loving passengers”) in the
business class cabin of an airliner which has lost its landing gear and is,
accordingly, forced to endlessly circle while authorities seek a safe place for
it to land. The economy class passengers have all be given a muscle relaxant to
put them to sleep. The two pilots (Antonio de la Torre and Hugo Silva) and
three business-class stewards (Raúl Arévo, Carlos Areces, and Javier Cámara)
are all gay—even though the co-pilot doesn’t at first perceive, as the pilot
describes him, that he is “a faggot,” and the pilot, despite his having an
affair with one of the stewards, defines himself as bisexual. The crew’s
obsession, predictably, is simply sex. While the “loving passengers” have other
obsessions: the banker Sr. Más (José Lujis Torrijo) is clearly focused on
money; the famed dominatrix, Norma Boss, seeks power; the movie actor Ricardo
Galán is attempting to escape his failed relationships with two women; while
Bruna (Lola Dueñas) is seeking acknowledgement and fame for her skills as a
clairvoyant; and the new married couple (Laya Martin and Miguel Ángel
Silvestre) are seeking marital bliss, and Infante (José María Yazpik), a
self-described security advisor and hit-man, is seeking out death, even though
he’d like to get out of his business. The movie spends most of its energy
revealing the obsessions and their effects.

In Spain, where the economy, much like Almodóvar’s airplane, is
perpetually circling in order to find a safe place to end its bumpy journey,
this work probably has more depth. I am sure that, in particular, the
dominatrix’s purported files of clients from the King on down to nearly
everyone in government has far more humorous resonance for the Spanish audience
than it does in the US. But, even then, this is not, in any sense of the
imagination, a profound or even complex work.

Nonetheless, it seems pointless to “trash” the movie as did the usually
fine and sympathetic critic Manhola Dargis, writing in The New York Times: “the journey generally drags because the
spinning characters, with their tired jokes and familiar melodramas, soon feel
so mechanical, like the automated parts in an Almodóvar machine”; or, even
worse, Michael O’Sullivan’s ungenerous comments in The Washington Post: "I’m
So Excited misfires on so many levels—tiresome plot; crude, juvenile humor;
broad, stagy acting and absurd characters; claustrophobic setting; and dull art
direction—that it’s hard to imagine it was all accidental.”

True, at moments Almodóvar’s film sputters
as if ready to go into a dive, but by and large, it flies by as a campy,
vamped-up soap-opera in the manner of…well, Almodóvar himself, channeling
someone like the great filmmaker of 1950s melodramas, Douglas Sirk. At the
center of this “slight comedy,” moreover, is an absolutely charming and
delightful drag-like rendition of the Pointer Sister’s energetic “I’m So
Excited” that is performed so hyper-kinetically perfect by the three stewardi
that I laughed through my joyful tears. Their entertainment, along with the
heavily spiked drinks they have just served up, suddenly send almost every
still-awake passenger and crew member into state of passionate lust, which
reveals that underneath each of their obsessions what they really need is just
to be loved or, at the very least, get fucked. Incidentally, I found the
costumes and art direction to be near-brilliant.

If Almodóvar’s message is a simple one—that life, in fact, is a kind of
circling through space where all we can do is to admit our failures, to love
one another, and help one another to get through the voyage—it, nonetheless,
resonates with a certain sentimental profoundness that is paralleled in all the
character’s final reconciliations with themselves and one another, a gentle
love-fest that few other motion pictures this year have been able to dish up.

I have now seen Fassbinder’s film Effi Briest three times, once in the
theater back in 1977, and two times within the past couple of years. Even
though the events and themes of Fassbinder’s work are fairly straight-forward, based
so faithfully as they are on Fontane’s turn-of-the-century narrative, I passed
on reviewing it the second time round, and almost felt not up to writing about
it this time, as if, as my title suggests, it was too vast a subject. And in
some respects this movie is, in its social and political implications, a work
that encompasses nearly all of the director’s major concerns, from the effects
of sex (as opposed to love) upon the lives of individuals, the restraints of
society that bind and destroy individuals, to the individual’s—once they defined
by the society or self as an outsider—own self destruction, and, as
Fassbinder’s subtitle suggests, their own confirmation of the brutal “ruling
systems’” values. These issues, the last in particular, are heady intellectual
dilemmas with which Fassbinder demands that his audience contend.

Some critics have criticized Effi Briest as being too cold and
calculated in its method and tone, and there is little doubt that Fassbinder,
unlike in so many of his other works (for example the film of the same year,
the emotionally-charged Fox and His
Friends), does purposely take an objective viewpoint, allowing each of his
central figures to reveal their own strengths and failings. But that does not
mean that the director of this fascinating film is “uninvolved.” Not only does
Fassbinder tell much of Fontane’s story, verbally interlinking the visual
scenes, but, at times, even speaks in Effi’s voice. The vast subtitle, also a
creation of the director’s, is an outright statement of how Fassbinder has read
the novel, perceiving it as a work that reveals “Many who have a notion of
their potential and needs, and who nevertheless in their heads accept the
ruling system and thereby consolidate and downright confirm it.” The ruling
system of this film is the horrifyingly rigid Prussian society of the Bismarck
era, the world that ultimately brought about World War I and, in turn,
generated the later Nazi thinking that would result in the holocaust and World
War II.

While it is true that Fassbinder purposefully delimits any sexual and
most emotionally-leaden scenes, describing them only through the narrator’s
voice or having them occur off screen, that does mean that Effi Briest is without intense feelings one can experience in
nearly every frame. First of all there is the very beauty and innocence of its
young heroine, Effi (the remarkable Hanna Schygulla), a truly naïve woman right
out of a Fragonard painting, swinging her way to the sun and stars. A true
product of her fiercely bourgeois parents, her doting father (Herbert
Steinmetz) and mother (Fassbinder’s own mother, Lilo Pempeit), the spoiled Effi
is without moral principle but, particularly like her mother, clearly still has
ambitions, as she herself admits. Although she does not even know the man,
Baron Geert von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck)—whom we observe voyeuristically
watching her early in the film—who asks for her hand, she is perfectly willing
to marry this much older, not very handsome, but politically rising figure. She
may fear that he is a bit too principled, but she ignorantly has no worries
whatsoever about being taken out of the gentle community of her childhood to an
isolated Baltic town, where even Instetten admits there are very few
intellectuals or people of high taste.

Accordingly, Instetten takes this innocent, like a stolen trophy, from
her mirrored, somewhat narcissist paradise into an even more closed society
which Fassbinder reveals not only through the hostile glares of the housekeeper
Johanna (Irm Hermann)—at moments reminding one of Mrs. Danvers of Hitchcock’s
melodrama, Rebecca—but through the
sorry condition of the Catholic Roswitha, whom cannot find employment because
of her religion, even though she admits she is “lapsed.” Highly corseted, Effi
is presented at most moments behind lace veils and lace beddings almost as if
she were living in a burka, a world which blurs her vision and often appears to
the audience like somewhat decorative bars of a prison. If that we’re enough,
her “highly-principled” husband tells her tales, described in the narrative as
“An Artifice Incalculated to Instill Fear” about a dead Chinaman whose ghost
supposedly roams the upper rooms of the house (a story confirmed by Johanna and
servants), which absolutely terrifies the young married girl whenever Insetten
leaves the house, and might serve as warning for any infidelity.

The one woman Effi meets who is both beautiful and able to sing quite
lovely songs, she is warned against. Even motherhood is denied her, the nanny
doing almost all the work having to do with her new baby’s care, allowing Effi
only, from time to time, to take up the child as she would a doll. Fassbinder’s
presentation of this event is painfully stunning, after which the child’s
caretaker, Roswitha, takes back the child, swaddling it as if, in its mother’s
hands, it had been in danger.

Is it any wonder that, mostly out of boredom and the failure of her husband
to demonstrate any love, Effi takes up with the witty, unhappily married rake,
Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel)? If the affair also occurs only off-camera, it is,
in part, because it hardly matters. But we do recognize her emotional delight
in the simple, if momentary, freedom it allows her as each day she walks to and
picnics at the beach. If this is sex without love, we have already been
presented, quite emotionally, what does matter in this house: the imprisonment,
bodily and intellectually, of its young mistress.

Her husband’s appointment to a Berlin ministry is the only thing that
temporarily saves Effi, as she is sent off to rent an apartment, she herself
determining never to come back. Like hundreds of women of the era, the young
woman counterfeits rheumatism and other such maladies in order to remain
bed-bound until her husband can join her in the capital. Yet, in behaving like
so many others, Effi, has in fact, doomed herself to her inevitable fate. It is
clear that Insetten cannot show love and that does not love him, but by
remaining in such a relationship, she confirms the ethics of repressed hate,
not even a repressed love. And that is the true tragedy Fassbinder’s film
reveals. Had Effi found love in Crampas’ arms she might have, at least, been
able to break with the values of the world to which she is bound; without even
that, she is allowed nothing. When discovering her stupidly-preserved mementoes
of that six year-old “romance,” Insetten ridiculously feels he has no choice
but to fight a duel with Crampas, a dilemma as outrageous as that described in Schnitzler’s
Lieutenant Gustl, published five
years later. But whereas Gustl discovers, fortunately, that his would-be
opponent has died during the night, Insetten must go through with the duel,
killing his former friend and divorcing his wife. The child remains with him,
and the woman he once proclaimed to love must face life alone in a boarding
house.Even her parents, in their
conventionality and their fears for neighborhood gossip, refuse to take her in.

Despite what we now perceive as the inner horrors of the outwardly ordered
world wherein Effi is entrapped, she refuses or is simply unable to rise up and
reject its values. She, now an outsider to society, perceives herself as just
that, as one unworthy of any other treatment. It is now clear just how her own
parents have conspired to keep her ignorant of any comprehension that might
have saved her. Twice in this film, the father utters the cliché that to
discuss such an issue is “too vast a subject.” The first time it is as he
speaks with Effi, attempting, we presume, to talk about love. We might simply
perceive that as a problem many parents face of being unable to talk
forthrightly to their children about sex. But even after, in her isolated world
Effi finally recognizes that her husband has turned her own daughter against
her, and falls ill—the parents finally indulging their beloved child by
allowing her to return home to die—Briest and his wife cannot admit to their
involvement in the series of events, cannot admit to themselves their own
guilt. Briest comments, once more, “It is too vast a subject,” refusing, in
short, to give the matter any deep thought.

If one still feels that this sad story is clinically presented, I
suggest that they also are not giving this amazing work the careful
attentiveness it deserves. Like so many Germans throughout that next century
(and, of course, not only Germans, but people all over the world), Fassbinder
suggests, refusing to independently think or to teach others to do so is the greatest
of all crimes, issues which, more recently Austrian director Michael Haneke has
revisited in his The White Ribbon.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Mel Dinelli, Robert E. Kent, Henry
Garson, and Robert Soderberg (screenplay, based on a story by Elisabeth Sanxay
Holding), Max Ophüls (director) The
Reckless Moment / 1949

Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment, a film I watched on television’s TCM the other
afternoon, begins quickly, immediately establishing the upper middle-class
suburban housewife’s, Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett), worries about her daughter
Bea (Geraldine Brooks), who is seeing an older man. Lucia’s husband is, inexplicably,
away in Berlin, and she is having some difficulties in controlling her
children, although her young son seems ordinary enough in his affection for all
things mechanical. And although the father-in-law also lives in their comfy
house, it is her maid who is Lucia’s biggest support.

It does not take the daughter long, moreover, to realize that her lover,
Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick), whom she clandestinely meets in the family’s
boathouse, is not truly interested in her as much as he is in her money and
shapely body, and in anger, she lashes out with a flashlight, hitting him over
the head several times, before rushing back into the arms of her mother. The
lover, surviving the attack, rises and dizzily walks toward to the door of the
boathouse, but stumbles once outside, falling through a wooden railing to his
death. There Lucia finds him, and, presuming that Bea has killed him, drags the
body to their boat, attaching him to the anchor before taking the boat out to
sea. Those “reckless moments” are the central events as the rest of this noir-like film (evocatively photographed
by Burnett Guffey) focuses less on action than on the consequences of those
“moments.”*

When the body is later found, Lucia and Bea fear arrestment, but the
mother, a bit like Mildred Pierce, is determined to protect her daughter, even
if it means her own arrestment. Forget everything, “You are never to speak of
it again,” she commands.

Out-of-the-blue, a petty thug, Martin Donnelly (James Mason), visits
them, sent by his loan-shark boss Nagel (Roy Roberts), to bribe her with the
letters the daughter has written to the dead man. Despite the fact that the
family is apparently well-off, Joan has difficulty in raising the required
$5,000; even her pawned jewelry brings in only $800.00. In trying to buy more
time, she meets again with Donnelly, he increasingly responding to her plight
and admiring her fortitude and gentle pride she displays in trying to protect
her loved ones.

Without preaching, however, Ophüls makes it quite clear that her actions
are not just motivated by Lucia’s attempts to save her children, but arise out
of a determination to maintain the quality and values of her life, to remain in
the bounds of the somewhat smug pretensions of her suburban world of Balboa.
Indeed, travels into the city—visits to nearby Los Angeles, required by Lucia’s
money-raising attempts—are suspicious to the family, as if in entering another
domain, she has temporarily abandoned her and their paradise. Even the maid is
worried for her employer, and when Donnelly shows up once more at the house,
the maid asks if she might join Lucia in the conversation, an offer Lucia
refuses, denying even her servant’s protection.

Donnelly attempts to convince her that she must immediately hand over
the money, insisting that not only does Nagel exist, but he is dangerous, but
Lucia confesses her failures at being able to even receive a loan—perhaps a
kind of subversive feminist statement, since we are sure that were Lucia’s
missing husband to apply for a loan, he would most likely easily be granted it.
By this time, however, the outsider to her world, Donnelly, has fallen in love
with her, and attempts to help her in her plight. Nagel, however, shows up, and
is determined to close the deal or kill his victim.

The almost inevitable events, Donnelly sacrificing his life by killing
Nagle, frees Lucia to escape back into the arms of her bourgeois society,
without, evidently, even so much as a twinge of moral guilt. As she has
commanded her daughter to do, she will, apparently, put it out of her mind, or
recall it, from time to time, as a bad dream. In comparison, the dashing
“outsider” Donnelly has behaved with an almost existentialist sense of moral
virtue that makes Lucia’s gentle protectiveness seem sterile and meaningless.
Indeed, it now hardly matters at all that her “missing” husband returns home.
She, her children, and, most importantly, her manner of life have been
protected to a return to “normalcy.” Most importantly, she has “saved face”—an
issue that would again arise in the director’s major last films, The Earrings of Madame de….and Lola Montès.

Early critics, such as Bosley Crowther, clearly missed the point,
describing the film as presenting a “callous attitude,” wherein the heroine
“gets away with folly.” But, in fact, Ophüls’ masterful film is an understated
condemnation of the post-War American domestic values that will be reiterated
throughout the next decade by filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk. *

Los
Angeles, July 11, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2013).

*I might just mention that in my
standard guides, I’ve never before encountered such controversy as to what
actually happens in this film. One might even ask what movie these different
reviewers witnessed? The usually commendable Time Out Film Guide suggests that the daughter “accidentally
killed” the villain boyfriend Ted Darby, perhaps the closest, if not exactly
accurate version, of the actual film events. The Turner Classic Movies Guide
describes the daughter as “murderous.” Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide of 1995 describes the mother, Joan Bennett,
as the murderer, with which Leslie Halliwell’s earlier Film Guide concurs, summarizing the events as “a women accidentally
kills her daughter’s would-be seducer.” The most confused statement appears in
the usually authoritative World Film
Directors, volume 1, which gets it all mixed-up: “Joan Bennett plays Lucia Harper, innocently
involved in murder and threatened by blackmail, and Geraldine Brooks is her mother,
who averts disaster by winning over the blackmailer.” I thought Joan Bennett was the mother,
Geraldine Brooks, her daughter! We all make mistakes, I certainly have in my
own critical essays, but truly everyone seems to have their own viewpoint on
this film!I’ll stick with my own
interpretation. I think it’s important that these women were both outwardly
innocent of the murder, but highly involved in its cover-up nonetheless. They
are guilty despite their ability to wash their hands of the actual murder. And
that is just Ophüls’ point. His film shares a great deal with Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, wherein nearly
everyone has been party to Harry’s death—without being the cause!

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Roger Ebert’s on-line review of Shane
Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
describes the film genre as “Action, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Thriller,” which
perhaps says it all about this frothy confection whipped up in a blender in
order to be consumed by absolutely anyone and everyone. Ebert goes on to somewhat
begrudgingly complain: “Kiss Kiss, Bang
Bang contains a lot of comedy and invention, but doesn’t much benefit from
its clever style. The characters and plot are so promising that maybe Black
should have backed off and the told the story deadpan, instead of mugging so
shamelessly for laughs. It could still be a comedy, but it would always be
digging its elbow into ribs. I kept wanting to add my own subtitles: ‘I get it!
I get!’” And, in large part, I find myself agreeing with him.

Yet, from its credits on, this film is so stylishly directed, wittily
conceived, and well-acted—particularly by the petty, East Coast thief, Harry
Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.) and the seasoned gay detective, Gay Perry van Shrike
(Val Kilmer playing “Gay Paris,” get it?)—that it almost seems mean-spirited to
throw a dose of cynicism into this brew, particularly since Black himself has
laced his creation with a camp cynicism just so that nothing, not even the
character’s youthful history played out in a Norman Rockwell-like Indiana,
tastes too sweet. All right, the plot makes absolutely no sense, and is so
convoluted that even an attentive reader like me, armed with a Wikipedia cheat
sheet, can still not make it out. But then a film that it models itself on
Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake—which
Time Out Film Guide describes as a “loopy”
piece—predictably, perhaps, argues that the film might intentionally make much
sense. I’ve seen The Big Sleep dozens
of times, but still don’t completely understand its “story.” And just like that
brilliant film noir what matters here
is the chemistry between its characters and their clever dialogue.

It’s almost as if writer and
director Black were betting with that devil, Pauline Kael, that he could make a
movie based on the action formula that might still be highly entertaining. Even
if in his attempt to do so he goes, at times, far over the top, even over the
edge, I think, ultimately, he succeeds.

It’s also, purportedly, the first time a major film action character was
gay. Kilmer is not great actor, despite his own estimation of himself, but in
his puffy good looks he is near perfect as the hard-core, experienced gumshoe,
Perry, enlisted to give newcomer, would-be actor Harry a taste of the
underworld life. “Rule number 1….This business. Real life, boring.” If nothing
else, Perry knows who and what he is.

Harry, on the other hand, who, after attempting to rob a toy store has
stumbled into an audition, convincingly acting out what has just happened in “real”
life (the auditioners are convinced his is a brilliant method actor), is a naïve
as they come. At his first Hollywood party he attempts to protect a sleeping
woman, Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), challenging the would-be “intruder”
to a fight, only to be severely beaten. Throughout the film, he is beaten again
several times, even by women, is shot, loses a finger, and is tortured with
electricity in his crotch. Convinced he is in love with Harmony—who, it turns
out, in this coincidence-packed movie, is his high school sweetheart (albeit
the only male in his class with whom she did not have sex)—yet even as an adult
who momentarily shares her bed, he does not “score,” although, what Harmony
says of another girl might equally apply to herself, “She’s been fucked more
times than she’s had a hot meal.”

Despite his seemingly heterosexual proclivities, Harry gets nowhere with
the women (is even voted out of a bar by the women within), he keeps coming
back and back to Gay Perry, despite Perry’s dismissal of him. And the only real
kiss he gets—in this “kiss kiss” tale—is when Perry, in order to evade the
police, embraces him for a long mouth to mouth munch. After he crawls into
Harmony’s bed, the scene ends with him arguing with her concerning her
admission that she had slept with his best high school friend—the only male,
other than himself, that he thought she had not had sex!

If Harmony and her dead sister, Jenna, along with the body of Veronica
Dexter, keep showing up in his life, it is because they are needy or dead, not
in love with Harry. As he himself hints, the women with whom he communes are
either perverted or deceased: “I mean, it’s literally like someone took America
by the East Coast and ‘shook’ it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.”
Certainly, his relationships with women are not ever harmonious.

In the end, it is only Perry who is truly honest with him, explaining
not only the ways the world but revealing the painful truth that Harry has been
lured to Hollywood as a ploy to get another actor. And it is Perry who perhaps
perceives how things stand:

Perry: Merry
Christmas, sorry I fucked you over.

Harry: No problem. Don’t quit
your gay job.

And later:

Harry: Hey,
hey, hey! It’s Christmas, where’s my present,

Slick?

Perry: Your fucking present is you’re
not in jail, fag-hag.

Harry’s telling of the story, as
the voice-over narrator of the piece, begins badly as he forgets to tell
important elements of the tale, including the somewhat meaningless intrusion of
an actor dressed as a robot entering Harmony’s apartment. So, it immediately
becomes clear, the story we witness may not be the whole story. Certainly by film’s
end, when Perry survives his apparent murder (an event which Black mocks by
having all the previously killed actors of the piece, including President
Lincoln, enter Harry’s hospital room, only to be hurried off by the nurse), we
recognize that his notion of Harmony being “the one who got away” is a kind of
hallucination, particularly when we discern that Jenna is not Harmony’s sister,
but her daughter through incest—which brings us closer to Chinatown, perhaps, than Woman
in the Lake or The Big Sleep.

It should come as no surprise, accordingly, that Harry admits, at film’s
closing, that he now works for Perry, with Perry, to close down the film,
putting his hand over Harry’s mouth as if to shut down any possible new
confessions. Perry, always the realist, even apologizes “to all you good people
in the Midwest, sorry we said fuck so much.” But then that is truly what this
film is all about, and it is nearly impossible to imagine Harry going on
without his rhyming-named friend. Harmony has finally been achieved.*

Los
Angeles, July 9, 2013

*I might also mention that this film
fits perfectly into the genre I have described as “Los Angeles” films, movies
that take place in the city, to which outsiders are attracted, feeling
themselves, a first, as outsiders before they come to recognize that, as
outsiders, they completely belong.

Stoppard’s brilliant 1967 play takes the
two minor characters of Hamlet through
an existentialist journey made up of language, a world in which these two
anti-heroes, inexplicably called into being by a court messenger, can
participate only through linguistic games as they try to explain their
existence and purpose. The marvel of this play was its youthful wit as the two
original actors, Brian Murray and John Wood, attempted to best each other with
rapid-fire language games:

Ros: We were sent for.

Guil: Yes.

Ros: That’s why we’re
here (He looks round, seems doubtful.

then the
explanation)
Travelling

Guil: Yes.

Ros: (Dramatically) It was urgent—a matter of
extreme urgency,

a royal
summons, his very words: official business an

no
questions asked—lights in the stable-yard, saddle up

and off
headlong and hotfoot across the land, our guides

outstripped
us in breakneck pursuit of our duty! Fearful

lest we come too late!

(Small pause)

Guil: Too late for what?

Ros: How do I know? We
haven’t got there yet.

Guil: Then what are we
doing here, I ask myself.

Ros: You might well ask.

Guil: We better get on.

Their “getting on,” however is harder than one might expect as they
encounter, in a play within a play, a group of performing actors who attempt to
play out a play very similar to the play they are living within. Once they do
reach Elsinore, moreover, Hamlet himself is playing with “words, words, words,”
as large groups of people come and go, vaguely ordering the pair to note
Hamlet’s behavior and comments. Yet, since these minor figures have few
encounters with the Danish Prince, most of what they observe is “offstage,”
through the cracks of walls, leaving them more confused than ever.

One of the great delights of Stoppard’s play is that despite this
couple’s inability to know even which of them is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
what their relationship is to each other (they are simply a “couple,” although
the playwright in determining that suggests perhaps something more than a deep
friendship), or what their true relationship is to Hamlet; they are simply told
they are old school friends.

The irony, of course, is that the audience already knows their fate—the
fate of nearly everyone within the play and everyone sitting in the audience as
well, which the playwright (just in case someone may have never read Hamlet) announces in the title itself.
Consequently the substance of the play depends upon their not-knowing, despite their intense cleverness, revealed,
particularly, in their philosophical and scientific thinking. The great
pleasure of Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern Are Dead, in short, is its Beckett-like representation of two
clueless everymen who trip through the language like clowns in their attempts
to comprehend their imposed reality.

It may be a basic trope—played out in numerous characters from Bouvard
and Pecuchet, Vladimir and Estragon, and even Abbott and Costello—but it works,
at least on stage and page, because of its basic dialogical rhythms, which is
at the heart of theater.

At the heart of film, however, is the image, and transforming a work of
“words, words, words,” despite the fact that the playwright remained in
complete control of this film, is most difficult. While the play begins
immediately with the toss of a coin (reinstating the themes of game and
chance), Stoppard’s movie version begins with a long ride through time and
space, with an even longer vertical dip by Guildenstern to reach down for a
coin he has spotted upon the ground. In these visual maneuvers, everything
changes, and what once was clever and witty—what once was based on “timing”—is
slowed down in narrative pace. By the time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get
into their dialogue, the audience has lost attention, and the characters seem
leaden.

I never saw the original production (my companion, Howard, did see it,
however, at the Alvin Theater in New York), but I am certain behind the verbal
gymnastics of the original actors was a great deal of joy; in the film,
although Gary Oldman (as Rosencrantz) and Tim Roth (as Guildenstern) are fine
actors, they seem to approach their verbal roles so diffidently that they
appear more as dolts rather than swordsmen of language.

The busy costumes and sets of the players, moreover, distract us from
any comments with which the two may joust. The abused child-actor Alfred is
converted into a knowledgeable drag-queen, removing some of the naughty sting
of the original. And by the time the couple reaches Elsinore, with its
cavernous spaces, almost any linguistic arousal has been dampened.

Strangely, Stoppard encourages this even further by having the seemingly
less intelligent Guildenstern express his intelligence in a series of visual
puns surrounding various physical principles such as Newton’s cradle, Newton’s
law of universal gravitation, the Greek principle of steam power, and the
creation of a bi-wing plane. At moments, these actions seem entertaining, but
once more they slow down the language which is the essential engine of
Stoppard’s play.

Several critics have argued that the film failed because of its attempt
to bring such a high level of language to the screen. But I would argue just
the opposite; it is almost as if the playwright, determining to make the work a
visual manifestation of his story, pulled the plug on the very source of its
energy.

In fact, what Stoppard does is to turn the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, inside out. Instead of
allowing the obscure figures to become the focus of the play, his cinematic
intrusions of time and space, refocus our attentions onto Hamlet. Richard Dreyfuss and the Lead Player, Iain Glen as Prince
Hamlet, Ian Richards as Polonius, and Joanna Miles as Gertrude are such fine
actors that, speaking Shakespeare’s lines, they dominate the play, and like
this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we are more attracted to the action going on
“onstage” (which might have been described as “offstage” in the original) than
we are the shenanigans of the sparring couple. In short, the movie entirely
loses the focus of the original play, ending up with in the dead center of what
was once a vortex, where, as Wyndham Lewis described it, art becomes abstract.

Accordingly, I believe the language-bound original was less abstract
than Stoppard’s visualization of his work, which is far more representational
than the very human rendering of complex ideas of the original.

By comparison with the “still-lives” portrayed by Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, the lightness of Iain Glen’s acting seems anything but morose.
Even Polonius seems more light on his feet that the two actors at the center of
this filmed version.

Perhaps a “staged” film might have generated more excitement than this
camera-busy “representation” of what once was a verbal delight. The death of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unfortunately, does not occur at the end of
Stoppard’s film, but in its very earliest scenes, and we can only wonder, as does
the comic couple of the title, whether there was a time at the beginning when
they might have said “no” to their excruciating voyage.

Encompassing 200 international movies, Douglas Messerli's Reading
Films is a highly personal but profound discussion of some of the most
important cinematic achievements from the earliest of film history--including
numerous silent films--to current movies in theaters at the time of this book's
publication.

As Messerli reveals in his insightful essay, "Reading Films," his approach is
not a mere evaluation of the films he has seen nor a passive appreciation or
dismissal, but a deeper look into the structures of the works, the films'
significance in society, and their directors' and actors' personal relationship
to the created works. Messerli not only "sees" the movies on which he writes,
but watches them over and over again, finally "reading" them as works of poetry
and fiction, evaluating and comparing them in terms of other works of art.

Yet there is nothing academic about Messerli's readings, written from 2000 to
the present. His short essays are filled with passionate prejudices and concerns
that sometimes take him on tangents other reviewers would not have dared. The
author is less concerned with audience approval or judgmental stances than he is
with exploring the worlds which these vastly different filmmakers have created,
elucidating the contradictions and the sometimes subtle problems these films
create which might have gone unnoticed even by their creators themselves.

Writing in a lively, sometimes colloquial, occasionally idiosyncratic
language, Messerli lays his heart on his sleeve, demonstrating his loves and
dislikes in the art of filmmaking. Reading Films is a work any film
lover--whether populist or admirer of art house fare--must read.

Noted editor and publisher Messerli is the author of eleven books of poetry,
two works of fiction, and three volumes of plays (written under the pseudonym of
Kier Peters). He has edited numerous collections and anthologies, most notably,
From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 and,
with dramatist Mac Wellman, From the Other Side of the Century II: A New
American Drama 1960-1995. In 2000 Messerli began an annual series of
cultural memoirs, My Year_____, which contain personal experiences and
essays on poetry, fiction, dance, music, art, theater, performance, and film.
The author is the editor of the online International Cinema Review and is
a regular film critic for the British on-line magazine, Nth Position. In
2004 he was named Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French
government.